Research Lines
The program has a single area of concentration - Semiotics and General Linguistics - around which its seven research lines are organized. Within each line, you can find the research projects of the faculty members.
Linguistic Form and Meaning: Levels of Analysis and Interfaces
- Research line encompassing projects aimed at studying linguistic form and meaning at their various levels of analysis (phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic), as well as the interfaces between these levels. It includes research that can contribute to the understanding of the nature of human language, whether through theoretical or empirical questions, and may involve the description and analysis of specific languages, comparative (cross-linguistic) studies, or linguistic phenomena recurrent in natural languages.
Faculty: Ana Lúcia de Paula Müller, Beatriz Raposo de Medeiros, Marcelo Barra Ferreira, Paulo Chagas de Souza, Jairo Morais Nunes, Raquel Santana Santos, Ana Paula Scher, Vitor Augusto Nóbrega
Description and Analysis of Non-Indo-European Languages
- Research line dedicated to the description and analysis of the phonic, morphic, syntactic, and semantic components of non-Indo-European languages, particularly African, Amerindian, and signed languages.
Faculty: Alexander Yao Cobbinah, Ana Lúcia de Paula Müller, Felipe Venâncio Barbosa, Luciana Raccanello Storto, Thomas Daniel Finbow
Description and Analysis of Verbal and Non-Verbal Discourses and Texts
- Research line dedicated to the analysis of enunciative strategies and mechanisms of meaning construction and organization of discourses; examination of the relationships between different texts and discourses of a culture.
Faculty: Antônio Vicente Pietroforte, Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros, Ivã Carlos Lopes, Luiz Augusto de Moraes Tatit, Norma Discini de Campos, Renata Ciampone Mancini, Waldir Beividas
Studies of Language Use, Variation, Contact, and Change
- Research line dedicated to the study of multimodality in linguistic interaction, different types of linguistic variation (with emphasis on their social significance), linguistic change, and issues involving language contact, taking into account, in addition to the grammatical and discursive characteristics of languages, the identity, ethnic, sociocultural, and historical aspects that involve them.
Faculty: Alexander Yao Cobbinah, Evani de Carvalho Viotti, Esmeralda Vailati Negrão, Ronald Beline Mendes, Thomas Daniel Finbow
Studies of Language Acquisition and Learning Processes
- Research line dedicated to the study of cognitive processes involved in the acquisition, learning, processing, or teaching of natural languages and the disorders and pathologies associated with these processes, based on linguistic theories for the formulation of hypotheses and analyses.
Faculty: Ana Lúcia de Paula Müller, Ana Paula Scher, Elaine Bicudo Grolla, Felipe Venâncio Barbosa, Raquel Santana Santos
Historiography and Documentation of Linguistic Theories, Descriptions, and Analyses
- Research line dedicated to the description and interpretation of the cognitive and sociocultural processes that led to the emergence and evolution of knowledge about language and languages over time; collection, editing, compilation, and dissemination of bio-bibliographical material about languages.
Faculty: Maria Cristina Fernandes Salles Altman, Olga Ferreira Coelho, Diana Luz Pessoa de Barros
Computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing
- Research line dedicated to the study of computational modeling of human language and automatic processing of natural languages; development and improvement of theoretical models, algorithms, and systems of automatic analysis at all levels of linguistic investigation.
Faculty: Marcelo Barra Ferreira, Marcos Fernando Lopes, Paulo Chagas de Souza